Wednesday, 12 October 2011

Arranged marriage

What a complicated matter this is. Most marriages used to be arranged in most parts of the world, the idea of romantic marriage coming second to the idea of romantic infidelity. Marriage legitimated children and property. In terms of sex it was better to marry than to burn, according to St Paul. If you couldn't be continent it was either a cold shower or a wedding.

I remember Sheena Iyengar, the author of The Art of Choosing, telling us on the radio programme, The Forum, how her parents had an arranged marriage back in India while she had a romantic one in the US. She remarked that her parents' marriage seemed to her a happy one. A love marriage developed.

I can't imagine either C or I would have been pleased to be part of an arranged marriage, but then we grew up in a different culture with very different expectations. For the purposes of marriage we not only had to love each other at some stage, but to have been in love with each other. Tick. That's fine then. Having been in love you were committed to life-long love. That was fine too.

But the point wasn't just love, of course. It was also choice. By choosing to marry we would become the self-consumers of our wooing. Choice was our divine right as consumers.

I am not in fact sure how far the scandal of forced marriage, as we perceive it now, is a scandal about love or a scandal about choice. I suspect it is more the latter than the former. Individual choice lies at the heart of western democracy, so it is a state matter that we should be able to exercise that choice.

*

This morning Harriet Harman was being asked about a judge overruling the law against importing young people for the purposes of forced marriage. The way she put it was that it was clearly wrong for a young woman in England to be forced to go to India and marry an older man or indeed for an older man to come to England in order to marry a younger woman.

Put that way it is in an odd argument. Traditionally, the groom has been a few years older than the bride so Harman must have been referring to the more unseemly matching of crabbed age and youth. Yes, but such marriages do happen for one reason or another, not excluding love, on a perfectly voluntary basis. Comparative age seemed to be beside the point. Most arranged marriages are between young people of a similar age.

The point is that the woman in such cases is always seen to be the victim. She has never even met the prospective husband, goes one complaint. But that means he has not met her either. The proposed marriage obliges him as well as her to embark on it.

His position in this is never questioned. His choice doesn't matter. That may be because, in the west, it is the man's prerogative to request and the woman's to deny or grant. The consumer choice is hers to exercise, not his. For her, it is assumed, the choice is vital, enduring and freighted with intense feeling. For him it's just a step in a set life-pattern. Feelings - say feelings he might have for someone else prior to the marriage - don't enter into it. That at least is how we see it. It's exactly how Harriet Harman saw it. The law against forced marriage is a law to protect women.

The very fact that it seems so natural is in itself strange. That naturalness assumes a great deal that is unstated and, possibly, uncomfortable.

There is that distinction, of course, Peter, but the point I was most interested in is that either way it is the woman that is deemed to be forced, not the man; it is her choice that is violated not his. I wondered what the assumption behind that was. Perhaps I didn't put it clearly enough in the blog.

"If you couldn't be continent it was either a cold shower or a wedding."

My instinct on reading this is that for young women, sexual intercourse is not a priority; for young men it is. I get the impression that men have erotic fantasies about sex in general, whereas women have romantic fantasies about being loved by a_particular_man. In which case arranged or forced marriage - and where is the line for a woman? - is a kind of serial rape.

I can't remember who wrote "men talk to women hoping to have sex with them; women have sex with men hoping to talk with them.

But that assumes women do not enjoy sex: that it is a price they pay just so they can talk.

Somehow I doubt that. People can talk without sex, however you interpret 'talk'. Some people maintain that it is actually better to talk without sex, leaving sex hanging in the air like a tantalising scent . (I am off now to take that cold shower.)

[returns]

It may simply be that women (in general) prefer sex under some conditions rather than another. The male choice in this is secondary. In fact it is rape. The female choice is primary.

I trivialise a little in talking about 'consumer choice'. That's a bit of mischief. But choice is at the core of it, for whatever reason the choice is made. Choice is power, choice is assurance.

My guess would be that, among other things, assurance is an important factor for women, as it would be for a man when considering the possibility of allowing someone to enter his body, particularly with the potential consequences of a) pregnancy and b) loss of respect and worth in societies where virgin marriage is the only authorised option.

Human life being as complex as it is, the assertion of that choice cannot help but be a form of power, and one of the greatest powers a woman has is that of granting or rejecting, approving or disapproving. In that respect, from early motherhood onwards, women exercise a vast amount of psychological and sexual power. The problem is that such power flickers and wanes. From that follow a good many other things.

no, not that they don't enjoy sex, but they enjoy other things as well. Do men?

I was thinking more of the fact that physiological release is not assured when a woman engages in sexual activity... I do believe that in my youth I did sometimes have sex when what I wanted was closeness. It took a gifted lover to awaken me to the ... but I digress...

"The problem is that such power flickers and wanes"mmmm. more of a male problem, I would have thought... tee hee

Well there's always football and the toolshed, Vita Brevis. Isn't that where we are safely occupied?

Your second paragraph is no doubt true, but it has been observed that when women do enjoy sex their enjoyment is greater. The literature on this subject is rather more than extensive. For men sex can be perfunctory, like fast food, but it can also develop from desire and passion and courtship and very much involve the rousing of female pleasure. Pornography inevitably features a great deal of female orgasm. Even though it may well be a pretence most of the time, it is interesting that the pretence should be required.

It is partly because a man is deemed to have 'failed' if he has not produced the desired effect. I remember a rather nice old poem on that subject by D J Enright, titled 'The Quagga'. It is here.

You may, if you were in a deprecatory mood, describe the male urge to produce female pleasure as a selfish competitive instinct, but you could also interpret it as a) a childish desire to please and find approval, b) the, still-selfish, increased effect of joint deferred pleasure as opposed to single relief, c) love, tenderness, etc. In certain circles (c) is generally discounted. Discounting (c) is another source of power. Hence the toolshed. And there are women who prefer controlled violence to any amount of tenderness.

As to power flickering and waning, in women it is the power of fertility and attraction, or what people my kids age called pulling power. It is that which flickers and wanes. Most objects of male desire are nubile and that condition doesn't last forever.

In men it may be a product of overfamiliarity, which is a condition of marriage in the anglophone world but is less so in the French. It might also be quagga syndrome (see above).

Both men and women are likely to suffer from flickering and waning. In men it is generally regarded as comedy and shame. Which leaves football and the toolshed. Comedy gold.

Life is comic and tragic of course. We do our best to help each other sometimes.

"Even though it may well be a pretence most of the time, it is interesting that the pretence should be required. "

Maybe she knows what he wants even though she may not know what she wants...

"You may, if you were in a deprecatory mood, describe the male urge to produce female pleasure as a selfish competitive instinct..."

You might, if you had ever come across it... no, but seriously, I for one would never discount (c).

"in women it is the power of fertility and ... ATTRACTION" ta da, thanks for bursting my bubble. I was enjoying this exchange up to that word...

"Most objects of male desire are nubile and that condition doesn't last forever"

I'm not sure if this is one-sided - most women are more powerfully attracted to men with lots of hair... but it's true, apart from the Cougar movement*, I don't think women seek men as eye candy.

When their pulling power fails, they turn to real candy and gossip...

Something that does amuse me is the fact that at fifty six and not in a relationship, the men who express an interest in me sexually are very, very young... often good-looking, and are hurt when I turn them down and tell them they remind me of my son. It's back to sex for art's sake - I can't generalise but it doesn't float my boat. It's all in the mind, as Virginia Wool would say, 3one word would suffice. But if one cannot find it?" (one writes poetry?).

Life is comic and tragic of course. We do our best to help each other sometimes.

"...it is the woman that is deemed to be forced, not the man; it is her choice that is violated not his."

Indeed - after all, both Romeo and Juliet are left dead on the stage.

Male victimhood is sometimes overlooked, but the other point to make is that the nature of marriage in a conservative society gives far less freedom and far greater duties to women. Men can experience unhappiness, for women it can be the equivalent of penal servitude.

So we are talking about a different degree of oppression, which can lead to a neglect of the male experience, but which is also understandable in the circumstances arising of strongly patriarchal societies.

Men can experience unhappiness, for women it can be the equivalent of penal servitude.

I know that's the general view, Peter, and that it is all but criminal to think any different, but I do sometimes want to swim against the tide in these matters.

The law I am talking about is a law here, not in India or elsewhere, and I don't really think that marriage has been more likely to be penal servitude for either sex in Europe. Women's penal servitude has been the domestic sphere which certainly is limiting: men's has been that of work (I mean jobs not 'careers',) the shame of not being able to provide when no work was available, and often a lifelong denial of their sexual nature. (Blake gets this about right) The 'good' working husband was one who came home and handed over his wages to his wife: the bad one was one who spent it on drink or anything else that was not for the family.

And arranged and forced marriages are just as likely to take place in matriarchal societies as in patriarchal ones. The matchmakers were generally women.

For all that I think there are powerful, if not absolute, reasons for marriage that include mutual benefits for both sexes and for the coming generation.